Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig b. March 27, 1886;Aachen (Rhineland), Prussia d.August. 19, 1969; Chicago, Illinois
German American architect (Bauhaus) who fled from Nazi Germany to the United States in 1937. Although lacking formal education in architecture, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe became one of the world’s most influential modernists, ranked with Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Walter Gropius.
He described his buildings as “skin and bones,” walls of glass held together by the steel infrastructure revealed on the exterior. Although his designs for private homes, university buildings, high-rise apartment buildings, and office skyscrapers, which were primarily rectangular, starkly minimal- istic, and austerely formalistic, became highly influential from the 1940s into the 1960s, only a few were ever built.Mies, who later added his mother’s maiden name van der Rohe, learned stonemasonry from his father, a stonecutter and mason. He attended the trade-oriented Cathedral School in Aachen for his last two years until his formal education ended at age fifteen. For the next four years, he served an apprenticeship as a drafter of ornamental stucco detailing for classical-style buildings. He worked for Bruno Paul, an interior and furniture designer in Berlin, in 1905.
Mies launched his own architectural career in 1907 with the design of a classical-style house. He joined the office of pioneering architect Peter Behrens (1868-1940) in 1908 and until 1911 allied himself with fellow firm members Gropius and the Swiss French architect Le Corbusier. After a year working in The Hague, Netherlands, Mies van der Rohe returned to Berlin to open his own design office. World War I interrupted his architectural career as he served for four years in the German army.
Back in Berlin in 1919, he experimented with designs never built, exhibitions, and writing theory. Wide publication of his work, especially in The Magazine G, founded in 1923, earned him a reputation as a visionary and appointment as first vice president and artistic director (1916-1932) of the Werkbund, a group of architects and industrialists aiming to improve German industrial design.
His masterpiece, the German Pavilion for the Barcelona International Exposition, brought international fame in 1929. The “Barcelona” chair he designed for it, with curved steel bands cantilevered to hold cushions, became popular as an icon of modern art and is still mass-produced in 2005. The pavilion was demolished in 1930 when the fair closed, but was reconstructed on that site in the 1980s.Mies’s Tugendhat House (1930) in Brno, Czechoslovakia, also became famous, and was restored in 1986 after being damaged. Mies became director of the Staatliches Bauhaus (State Building School), the renowned school of arts and design in Dessau, in 1930, replacing Gropius and gaining an international reputation for his architectural philosophy. Nazi political pressure made the school move to Berlin in 1932 and to close in 1933.
Mies fled to the United States in 1937, his reputation increasing despite many unbuilt designs or exhibition buildings temporarily installed at world fairs. In 1938, he was named director of the architecture school at the Armour Institute, later the Illinois Institute of Technology (ITT), and won the commission to design a new campus—work inspired by industrial forms built of brick, steel beams, and glass walls that occupied him until his 1958 retirement to independent practice in Chicago. Notable designs include Chicago’s Promontory Apartments (1949); the Farnsworth House in Piano, Illinois (1946-1950); the two-towers of Chicago’s 860 Lake Shore Drive Apartments (19481951); the four-tower complex of that city’s Commonwealth Promenade Apartments (1953); and Neue National Galerie (1965-1968) in Berlin. One of his largest projects was New York’s Seagram Building (1954-1958) with Philip C. Johnson.
Known for his “skin and bones” architecture, he won the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1959 and that of the American Institute of Architects in 1960. His design dictum entered the American vernacular: “Less is more.” and “God is in the details.” His last major building was the National Gallery (1968) in West Berlin. Although architectural modernism became passe, his design legacy can be seen in the design of lobbies, hotels, convention halls, and open office floors.
Blanche M. G. Linden
See also Bauhaus; Gropius, Walter Adolph
References and Further Reading
Blaser, Werner. Mies van der Rohe: Continuing the Chicago School. Cambridge, MA: Birkhauser, 1981.
Drexler, Arthur. Mies van der Rohe. New York: Braziller, 1960.
Hilberseimer, Ludwig. Mies van der Rohe. Chicago: Theobald, 1956.
Lambert, Phyllis, ed. Mies in America.
Montreal: Canadian Centre for
Architecture, 2001.
Schulze, Franz. Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.